Writing Workshop Forms

I guess that I am already getting into this Blogging thing!  :)  I just keep posting away!  Hopefully I can catch up with what I have been doing for the past month so that I can slow down my posting!  :-D  I promise that I normally will be too busy grading and writing lesson plans to post more than once a day!

Writing is probably the subject that I need to work on the most!  I have used Lucy Calkins Units of Study and loved them.  The problem is that I do not have enough time to complete her lessons.  I have tried to adapting my school curriculum, Rigby Literacy by Design because it moved WAY too fast for my students.  I have tried a weekly theme and have the students write a nonfiction story about the theme week 1 and a fiction story week 2.  Finally this year I have tried something else and LOVE it!

I created generic forms to use when writing entertaining, persuasive and informative stories.  You can find it here on TPT. 

I started out this year with sticker stories (I am thinking about moving these to my Daily 5 work on writing rotation.)  My students love these but they were too easy for about a third of my class. 

I didn't plan on starting the writing forms until half way through the year.  I grabbed out the forms and pulled the 8 students to the carpet.  We started going through the pre-writing form and they did EXCELLENT!  I couldn't believe that they understood what to do!  In the next few days following I would read the prompts one at a time on the drafting sheet.  The students did an amazing job on this as well!  Their final stories looked like what I expect of my high students in the middle of the year and they did it on week 2 of school!

Here is an example of one of the students' writing:  (Please remember that we haven't covered any punctuation/ writing process etc. yet!  This was the second week of school!)

I'm so proud of my little ones!  

I'll be posting again soon!  ;) 

-Danielle